To improve a software application and make it more user-friendly, developers need to understand how users interact with the application. Traditional methods of understanding a user's behavior while using a software application include user surveys, usability lab studies, and focus groups. However, these methods provide only a limited picture of the overall user experience. Moreover, these methods are often inaccurate and costly for the software developer. There is a need to track actual usage in near real-time so that a realistic view of how a software application is used by real customers may be examined to determine where improvements are necessary.
In the past, specific builds of a software application have been modified with instrumentation code so that user interaction may be recorded into files, these files returned to the software developer and subsequently examined. These special purpose builds would write out to a data file when specific user actions occurred. For example, instrumentation code would be added to the software application so that every time the save function was executed data was written out to a data file. The user would periodically connect their computer to a remote site and upload the data file. Although this process provides some information, it does have some drawbacks. One drawback is that only user interaction that has specific instrumentation code is written out to a data file. For example, if a save button is used but no instrumentation code has been provided for writing to a data file, then this data is not written out to a data file and the software developers are unaware of the user's actions. Another drawback is that the instrumentation code added to the source code of the application may add bugs to the source code and cause problems. Still another drawback is that the instrumentation code may make the software application larger and may make it run slower.
In the past, Internet and dot-com companies have collected user data using server logging to paint a full picture of feature usage, such as for websites. However, this data collection requires a user interaction with a web server to track the user interaction and does not function when collecting data on client-installed software usage.